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School of How posted:Does anybody here work a job with minimal work hours? My current gig is the best, I basically come in every Monday through Thursday at 2PM, and leave by 5PM. Basically a 12 hour work week. I've been doing this for the past 2.5 years or so. I really like his work schedule (for obvious reasons) but I feel like this work schedule is starting to get to me. I feel like my next job switch is coming up, and am afraid my next job is going to require me to do a full 8 hour work week, which I really don't want to do. Basically the reason why my boss lets me work so few hours is because I always deliver working code every day. Most programmers can't close a single ticket unless you give them one week or more to do it. My boss can come to me with a problem, and I can usually get it done within 10 or 15 minutes, and that includes testing and deployment. Is it possible to find a job that where I can come and go as I please as long as I get all work done? Do you work for Hello World, Inc?
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Sep 18, 2015 15:49
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baquerd posted:I had a job like his where we had a custom reporting platform in finance. Users would request a new type of report, and the coding, while it was technically true coding, was just throwing together a few different components and specifying what amounted to join columns and group by statements. This did literally take less than a half hour a fair amount of the time, but for some reason it was expected to take a week. Yeah, I had a similar job, except working on a rule engine. My project manager actually took me aside and told me to work more slowly and maybe surf the internet or something. I was knocking stuff out in one hour that unbeknownst to me was previously estimated to take 8, and we were billing the customer by the hour. The upshot here, as I would also say to School of How, is that I didn't learn jack poo poo at that job, and every day I went in there was one more day when my skills were atrophying and I was ultimately screwing myself.
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Sep 18, 2015 17:48
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Algorithms by Vazirani, U. and Papadimitriou, C. and Dasgupta, S. I'm looking for a decent text to refresh my nitty gritty from undergrad. Is there a particular advantage of this book over CLRS, since I still have a copy of that from the 90s?
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Sep 19, 2015 15:10
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Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Man, that's the thing about counter-offers - sometimes they offer you a positively ridiculous amount of money to not leave. It's also not like you're immediately setting yourself to get fired once they actually find a replacement (like the conventional wisdom says) - they're probably perfectly willing to let you work at un-loving your workplace, listen to your suggestions, etc. Yeah, I thought the conventional wisdom was that even if they don't fire you, you'll be pissed off again six months down the line and will start looking again anyway.
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Nov 6, 2015 17:14
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Cryolite posted:I asked the CEO during the interview if he plans to take the company public and he said no. He said once the equity vests you can sell it, however I don't understand who I'd be selling it to if it isn't public (unless it would just be selling it back to the company or other employees). Given these circumstances I would value these RSUs (and the equity it converts into) at $0.00. If the salary is good, awesome, take the job. But if there are no plans to go public, I can't see a realistic way to get liquidity out of these unless the company gets sold and they have to cash you out under the change in control provision. Especially considering a vesting date of 3-5 years into the future, do you expect you'd be working there in 5 years anyway?
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Jan 9, 2016 23:14
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:Really starting to be reminded how lot of interview processes aren't testing for success under normal conditions. I have never had an opportunity to do it, but I really want to like the idea of the weeklong pairing "interview." Give me an opportunity to see if the codebase is a dumpster fire, and get a patch through code review to see if my potential colleagues are jerks or not. But since I can't take a week of PTO for every company I want to interview at, I get to write fibonacci sequences on whiteboards instead.
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Jan 11, 2016 16:46
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Doctor w-rw-rw- posted:So what I *actually* got was four different tree/graph traversal questions, and was told I needed to not write pseudocode, and write in Objective-C instead. "Write this in ObjC, but when you hire on we're most likely going to have you do your job in Swift instead"
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Jan 16, 2016 03:50
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baquerd posted:That's a huge problem, cross-training and knowledge sharing is critically important to the health of an organization. https://twitter.com/asolove/status/697514682022830080
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Feb 15, 2016 00:14
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30 years ago was before they made the SAT easier in the early-mid 90s. Prior to then the SAT was a Mensa qualifier, so I assume that's sort of an indirect bragging about that.
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Mar 16, 2016 04:13
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I liked the interviews I had for my current job. Sure, a few simple whiteboard questions just to prove I'm not completely stupid. But also we spent a bunch of time talking about architectural problems we've had in our respective projects. For instance they threw out problems they were recently dealing with, and they had me show them the app I was working on and what some of my tough problems were. They were clear up front that they had a week or more to figure out a solution to their problems and I was getting 45 minutes, and they're calibrating expectations accordingly. Bottom line though is that it was a really fun discussion, and it paid off in multiple ways because both sides got to learn something about how they'd work in the real world. Also we were able to use these questions to filter out people who otherwise had good CS credentials but when we asked them to design software, they proposed something completely idiotic that we would never pass code review.
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Apr 9, 2016 18:24
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What are the SDE title levels at Amazon? For instance the friend who referred me for an open position is an SDE III, what level of experience/responsibility does that correlate to?
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Apr 14, 2016 01:49
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Speaking of leaving a job due to company culture. What constitutes job hopping and is this really even an issue for software engineers in tyool 2016? My average tenure at the 4 jobs I've had since college, excluding my current job, is roughly 36 months (4 years, 18 months, 4 years, 2 years). Been at my current job for 10 months. I like my immediate teammates and my boss quite a bit, and I work on a high profile product with millions of users. Nothing really is bad from a day to day standpoint at all. But the company culture outside my team is kind of an obstructionist tire fire and it really eats at me. I've got an interview scheduled week after next with a company that I take to have a much better engineering culture, and it's an even higher profile product by an order of magnitude. Also from what I have heard, the comp would be such that I'd frankly be an idiot not to take the position. If I get an offer from these guys and leave my job after ten months, is that going to follow me around for a while and look really bad?
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Apr 25, 2016 02:16
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Yeah, if you have an EAP team to work with, they should be able to guide you into helping with HR/etc in a dignified manner. I'd say definitely invoke that sooner than later if it's affecting your performance. Also the whole stigma around this stuff really bugs me. Compare to, say, if someone gets in a car wreck and had to stay out of work a couple weeks, or had any other illness.
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Jun 1, 2016 23:22
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My team has picked people up from Hired, and we're a respectable company you've definitely heard of, so it isn't totally a black hole.
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Jun 3, 2016 18:49
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csammis posted:As others have said it's very normal in most of America. I've had non-compete clauses in my last three jobs (Missouri / Kansas for what that's worth):  I think I have a really good idea of what medical software giant this is. I interviewed with them my senior year in college right after a certain internal memo got leaked. I asked the interviewer for his own opinion about what work/life balance was like there in light of that, hoping to get his side of the story rather than what I just read in the news. That went over like a lead balloon.I had a past job with an ERP firm who made me sign a noncompete agreement. Basically because this company was formed from lots of acquisitions, they were in all kinds of lines of business, so effectively any sort of business software provider would be a "competitor." Regardless of the specific product line that I worked on. Also it specified all of North America as the geographic scope. My wife was a corporate litigation attorney at the time I hired on with that company. She looked over the noncompete, and said that the geographic and business scope were so broad that a judge would laugh it out of court. Erwin posted:Any tips on finding a remote job? Obviously I can let recruiters know that that's what I'm interested in when they contact me, but I wasn't sure if there were any job sites out there focused on that. I walk to work now and am not interested in driving very far to a new job. I'm outside of Philly and would be fine going into Philly once per week, or to New York or DC a few times per month, but I really would like to try a full time remote position. When I work from home at my current job, I get more done. I know that working from home doesn't work for a lot of people, but I believe that I'm a good fit for it. Check out weworkremotely.com and remoteok.io for job boards. I'm on my third remote gig and all of these have been obtained through my personal network, though. It's easier to get hired remote if someone knows you and can vouch for you being good. My current job I landed by way of a slack group for my specific field and I had made at least some impression that way.
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Jun 21, 2016 22:47
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Random musings: I cannot believe the boost to my career, visibility, and general developer community involvement now that I work for a place that actively supports and sponsors me on speaking at/attending conferences. It sounds stupid and obvious in retrospect, but there are so many employers that give zero fucks about this.
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Aug 10, 2016 05:07
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I don't know about 90 but I've worked at a place that do a 180 day probationary period for new hires. I can think of several instances where people completely failed to account for any meaningful contribution and were let go at their six month review. We're talking not even checking in a simple bug fix here. 90 days in software seems a little too short to be able to fully get your head into a decent sized code base. I feel like in my history that 75-90 days was where I really started to get a handle on everything I was working with.
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Aug 10, 2016 14:07
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Remote has worked OK for me, but I've worked on teams that were also split across multiple physical offices in addition to having remotes. So at that point everyone has to act as though everyone else is remote anyway. You can't just tap on someone's shoulder in the office and make a decision without involving anyone else.
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Sep 25, 2016 00:32
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If the take-home isn't a total trainwreck I don't mind it. A past job of mine gave iOS/Android candidates a take-home that would probably take an hour if you were at all qualified to do the job. We're talking "here's a well documented REST API endpoint and a super simple design comp, call that API and display the returned output in a list view per the comp." That's it. If I can spend an hour doing that to prove I can do the job and get out of two or three additional hours of doing whiteboard crap I'll pick that every time.
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Oct 9, 2016 22:49
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Good Will Hrunting posted:A bit off topic, maybe the wrong thread, but I figure a lot of people here work at places with unlimited PTO. How much time do you end up taking off? i've taken 9 vacation days and 3 sick days thus far. My manager has taken 27 vacation days so I feel like I should take more? Unlimited vacation is such a crapshoot. I worked at such a company; when I was in the interview pipeline and my boss called me to present the offer he said "I'm from Europe and I fully expect to see you take 5 weeks off a year." He actually held me to it; at one point he told me I didn't take enough time off and I needed to fix that. Then that boss quit to found a startup, I got re-orged, and my new boss didn't see things the same way. In a year's timeframe I was able to get like 8 days out, and I had to dodge said boss' lunatic release schedule to be able to do this. In your situation though, if your boss is taking 5 weeks off then you should be doing that as well. edit: couple blog posts that sum up how i feel about unlimited vacation in general http://suitdummy.blogspot.com/2016/02/unlimited-vacation-only-what-you-need.html http://blog.danlew.net/2016/02/22/unlimited-vacation-policies-are-inherently-unfair/ kitten smoothie fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Nov 4, 2016 |
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Nov 4, 2016 04:22
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withoutclass posted:If you're not taking advantage of the unlimited PTO, you're being taken advantage of. One of the psychological things that happens is that since you can take as much as you want, most emoloyees end up taking drastically less because there's no fear of losing your PTO. This is of course poor thinking given that they no longer have to pay out PTO. Most companies aren't going to make you use your PTO, please take care of yourself. The thing about unlimited vacation is that it trades "use your days or lose them" FOMO with fear of being perceived as using more vacation time than is acceptable. And of course companies deliberately do not issue guidance to managers as to how much vacation the company deems to be acceptable, which ends up feeding this fear. I assume that to do so would put them in danger of having their PTO policy being construed as offering a specific bucket of days, and the legal liabilities that come with it. That and it would result in people in general taking more PTO, which is not in the company's interest, so better for them to stfu about it and keep it hazy.
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Nov 4, 2016 15:51
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Jose Valasquez posted:Minimum PTO would be a much better policy if your goal as a company is getting people to use it. If you haven't used your X days on 365-X then don't come back until January. This is actually a mandated thing in many financial firms, where you're forced to take time off and they cut off your vpn/email/etc. They do it as an internal controls rule, because it's harder for you to keep a scam from unraveling if you have to disconnect for two weeks.
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Nov 4, 2016 19:10
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Got an interview Monday I'm feeling really good about. From my experiences thus far with these folks I am feeling that if I get an offer I'm probably going to accept the hell out of it. I'm also on PTO until end of the year, as is most of my team. What's protocol in this sort of situation if I give notice? Would they probably just term me right away and pay out my PTO bucket rather than have me around and be on vacation? Should I cut my current employer some slack and set up an end date in early January so there's time for tying up loose ends? The advantage for me in doing this is I would also get my PTO bucket replenished on 1/1/17 and they'd pay me out a whole years worth of accruals upon terminating.
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Dec 10, 2016 21:24
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asur posted:It's pretty unlikely that they'll terminate you unless that's the standard policy. As r4 mentioned the handbook may have a policy in place, I know that at one company I worked for you had to work at least one day after PTO or vacation for it to be paid out. Regardless it's a dick move to give your two week notice and then take PTO for all of it. The whole point is to wrap up or pass off your work and you can't do that if you aren't actually there so just give it when you get back in January. Yeah, new gig is cool with me having a start date in mid-January so I'll just turn in my two weeks immediately after the new year.
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Dec 13, 2016 21:51
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Iverron posted:Even if they care, if you have a particular level of domain knowledge around a client / product, good luck getting most of them to do anything about it but make empty promises. In my personal experience, when I start getting pigeonholed, that's the beginning of the end of my employment there. It just happened with a coworker last week. I'd be surprised if it doesn't happen to me again here. That sounds like bad management, because as soon as you start pigeonholing people then your team is not a team, so much as it's a loosely bound collection of single points of failure. You go on vacation, get sick, quit, or get hit by a bus, and suddenly there goes that domain knowledge that apparently mattered so much that only you could do that job.
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Dec 27, 2016 07:27
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lifg posted:Experience is what you make of it. Being in a bad place but fighting to improve it, or at least honing your sense of code smells, is absolutely better for you and your career than not working. If they're not receptive to you fighting to improve it, though, then gtfo and go somewhere else that does. Being able to identify a code or architectural smell is great if the organization lets you actually try to address it. Otherwise you're building a mental model of code smells with untested hypotheses as to how to fix them.
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Dec 27, 2016 18:33
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lifg posted:Fighting and failing is still useful experience. All else being equal, which is a huge step, I'd sooner say yes to an interviewee who had read Dale Carnegie (and Crucial Conversations and such) and tried and failed to convince their bosses to do better, than one who didn't try. Oh yeah, we're on the same page there. I'm not arguing for stepping over problems rather than trying to fight to fix them. But at some point if you continue to see problems, you continue to rock your Dale Carnegie skills to push proposed solutions up the chain, and management's response is not to care, maybe it's time to find a workplace where they do. I'm primarily quitting my job because there was a cultural 180 done about keeping the org's technical house in order. The prior leadership cared about hearing about problems, prioritized them according to business value but still enabled people to fix them, and used their authority to involve other teams/etc if necessary. When I interviewed with these people it was amazingly refreshing and I was super excited to be signing on with them. They rocked the boat too hard about this stuff and got forced out. The current leadership would rather ship broken software in a broken environment because they can put "shipped XYZ" bullet points in their quarterly powerpoint decks to their bosses, and taking time out to fix things would result in a deck with fewer bullet points.
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Dec 28, 2016 04:44
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Sometimes clean desks also mean they have a hot-desking/hoteling policy where they're liberal about WFH but also only have enough desks for 60-80% of headcount. You either bring your stuff home every night or you put it in a locker.
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Dec 28, 2016 18:32
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smackfu posted:Has anyone tried negotiating benefits / vacation days at a large company? They seem to have so much policies around it that doing a one off deal would be hard. I haven't done this myself, but I've had friends who have successfully negotiated to get more vacation time at big and small companies. Usually the sort of thing where if the company's rule is that you get X days as a new hire, X+5 days after 2 years, X+10 after 5, and they negotiated to start at the next tier on day 1. Don't let the policy angle on it dissuade you from trying to negotiate. I used to work on HR software that handled stuff like time, attendance, vacation accruals, etc. Nearly every rule or policy that could apply to you with regard to this stuff can be easily overridden by HR just for you.
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Dec 28, 2016 21:12
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Good Will Hrunting posted:I'm poo poo but going to be paid like I'm less poo poo, how do I improve myself. Don't equate salary to skill, ability, etc, because that's gonna make your head hurt. There are absolute worthless goldbrickers out there making $200K and there are brilliant, highly effective people making $60K. A few years back I took a job that paid $50K more. My initial assumption was that they expected me to be worth $50K more than I was before. Cue the feelings of wondering if I could up my game that much. Turns out I was just fine the way I was, new position posed an appropriate degree of challenge/personal growth and was not insurmountable, and the prior job just paid garbage money.
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Dec 29, 2016 19:27
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smackfu posted:Changing jobs in mid December has interesting side-effects. Like the new job treats holidays as PTO and you earn PTO only if you are employed on the first of the month. So, technically I didn't get Christmas off even though the office is closed. Hmmm. Similarly, no sick days for me! I feel like they really should have though through the edge cases on this stuff. I don't like the whole holiday-as-PTO thing. It is nice that if you don't travel for Thanksgiving and don't need that Friday off work, or if you don't celebrate Christmas, you can trade the day for somewhere else. But it's also often used to say things like "We offer new hires 26 days PTO" with a great big asterisk that 11 of those are holidays.
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Dec 30, 2016 20:17
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sarehu posted:So I applied for a job and got an email from an internal recruiter asking to schedule a call (on some online calendar thingy). Next available time was a bit more than 2 weeks from now. How do you get things moving faster? Was it on youcanbook.me or some site like that? I'd just mail them and ask; you'd think if a candidate expressed significant interest and wanted to work on a quicker timeframe, they'd prioritize that person and not want to lose the lead.
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Jan 9, 2017 16:02
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ratbert90 posted:Companies can't legally punish people for discussing compensation with other employees. That's a federal law as far as I remember. This has been illegal for longer than any of us have been alive, but it didn't stop a former employer from putting it in the handbook as a fireable offense. From checking the wayback machine it looks like it took them until 2016 to strike that from the handbook. I wonder if someone pointed it out to them, or if they got taken to court over it.
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Jan 16, 2017 23:04
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Doghouse posted:Hot drat I wish I had a salary like that. Out here in St. Louis it's nothing like that at all. Do what I do, work remotely for SF/NYC based companies and enjoy the cheap real estate in St Louis.
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Feb 6, 2017 02:15
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Iverron posted:On a scale of 1 to 10 how desperate would you have to be to take a remote job for a company with no current remote employees? The product seems interesting but that just really feels like bad idea. I'd have to get the temperature of the room as far as how amenable the team is to do decisionmaking and communication out in the open. Are they actually OK with hashing that out over slack or video call, or do they just want to walk over and tap someone on the shoulder. My current team has two remotes out of 12, myself included, so it's different than the past jobs I've had were 50% of the team was remote and the office-based people were spread across two or more company locations. But the other remote is a friend of mine who also lives here in St Louis, and we are the sole Android developers for our project, so if we really have to we can just both meet at a coffee shop and pair in person. apseudonym posted:Honestly with those reviews I feel like no one goes to leave a review there if they're happy so lots of positive posts on those sites make me nervous. At a former employer of mine, when HR did a 30-day checkin for new hires, they mentioned "don't forget to go onto Glassdoor and give us a review." This had the effect of totally skewing their ratings with 5-star reviews. The only basis for a review you'd have in 30 days in was that "new job" honeymoon period, and that there was a kegerator in every microkitchen.
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Feb 9, 2017 05:49
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Good Will Hrunting posted:How clueless do you have to be to ask your new employee, not even a month into the job, who has yet to do any work on the project they were hired to work on, to help you in the hiring process lmbo Yeah it's pretty clueless to enlist the help of the person on the team who most recently went through the hiring process as a candidate, still has it fresh in their mind, and thus can offer a unique and knowledgeable perspective on it
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Feb 20, 2017 22:06
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http://www.nytimes.com/2001/04/05/business/stinging-office-memo-boomerangs-chief-executive-criticized-after-upbraiding.html Also the famous Cerner memo that tanked their stock 22%, when the CEO said he wanted to see the parking lot full at 7:30 AM - 6:30 PM, and wanted it half full on Saturdays. I knew a couple people who worked for Cerner, around the time of that memo. They said that 40 hours/week would, at best, get you subpar annual reviews. 50/week was necessary to tread water, and the people who were actually getting promoted were pulling 60+. From Glassdoor, it sounds like the place hasn't changed a lot in that regard 15 years down the line.
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Feb 26, 2017 00:40
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lifg posted:I've never understood counteroffers, it seems like a sign of a bad compensation plan. But then I've never angled for or received one. Before I'd have gone interviewing, I would've already exhausted all the usual channels for getting things fixed. I can't imagine they'd pull out all the stops and actually fix things just because some individual contributor showed up with an offer in hand. Minimal upside from a counteroffer, but all that downside like this article mentions.
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Apr 10, 2017 04:55
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necrobobsledder posted:In my exit day group meeting (they're batched together) back in 2006, I was the only one quitting in the entire room of 40+ - everyone else was retiring and literally into their 70s or were transferring to other sites and it was just a formality to "exit." This seems really strange, they do exit interviews and offboarding in a big batch, like they do new hire orientation?
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May 29, 2017 06:11
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ToxicSlurpee posted:That's insultingly low for anybody with any experience at all, isn't it? I mean like...anywhere. Just today I saw a job posting here in St. Louis calling for >=3 years post-grad experience in front-end web development. $49K. The cost of living here is cheap but $49K is still an insulting number in tyool 2017. I made $55K immediately out of school in 2003.
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Jun 2, 2017 04:08
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